The coronavirus pandemic could have been much worse without vaccines, according to a new study that claims that the number of deaths reported worldwide by the coronavirus would be more than three times higher than it is today.
In the year since the vaccine was introduced in December 2020, more than 4.3 billion people have been inoculated, saving 20 million lives, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
If the World Health Organization’s goal of 40% vaccination by the end of 2021 in low-income countries is achieved, another 600,000 lives will be spared, the study said.
The findings “measure how much worse a pandemic could be if we didn’t have these vaccines,” said Imperial College London lead researcher Oliver Watson.
“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to mind,” Watson said of the deaths that would have occurred without widespread vaccination.
More than 6.3 million people have died from the coronavirus, including more than a million Americans, according to Our World in Data. More than 40,000 New Yorkers have died from the virus, health officials said.
Researchers studied data from all but ten of the world’s 195 countries and found that vaccines prevented 19.8 million deaths, including 4.2 million deaths in India and 1.9 million in the United States.
One million people in Brazil have also been spared deaths from the virus, as have more than half a million people in France and the United Kingdom, researchers said.
The study found that 14.4 million deaths were prevented in COVID-19 deaths alone, but the number of lives saved increased significantly when scientists reported deaths possibly related to the virus.
About 4.3 billion people received the COVID vaccine in the year following its introduction.
The study had some significant limitations. China, the world’s most populous country, was among the countries excluded from the study due to a lack of information about the effect of the virus on its vast population, researchers said. The effect of mask wearing, blocking and possible mutations in COVID-19 in the absence of the virus were also not considered in the study.
An unpublished model from the Seattle Institute for Health Indicators and Estimates estimates that 16.3 million lives have been saved by vaccines.
“We may disagree on the number as scientists, but we all agree that COVID vaccines have saved many lives,” said Ali Moqdad of the institute, explaining that stricter policies would have been implemented worldwide if the vaccines had not been around during the rise of the delta variant.
“Although this time we did quite well – we saved millions and millions of lives – we could have done better and we need to do better in the future,” said Adam Finn of Bristol Medical School in England, who did not participate in the published on Thursday findings.
With AP wires
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